David McLean

broken social

it is worlds broken and the words that tied the together pottage and impotence, rubble and ruin an ancient temple withstanding its forgetting all of this degenerate secondary forever, here we have put the unforgiven like rulers and children. the moon shines her mindless slight light to silver blanket a land where perverts might inhabit their eminent territories made of forever and forgettable; where de Sade and his loveless cutlery dwell full of temerity, terror and not touching, nothing immoral or needing forgiving. the castle is an arrow intended, a progressive sense of heaven, incarnated again in us tonight like Bodhidharma dancing, the Bodhisattva vow broken like a bow intent on missing. what it feels to lose everything you ever had or wanted forever is ecstasy and madness. traveling is a question of lost and disembarking at random; the goals are targets are all broken. happy is the homeless.

there have been gods and seas and lakes and water and sweaty Dagon sleeps his days dreamless to arise from some sullen sea formless, like words jumping up from being like startled values falling apart stupid as a family of partridges; the mirrors are fragile and unforgivable like nightmares and impossible, this is the quotidian listless the anxious razor waiting. here is blood and dead skin, the arms of ridiculous children.

 

and the sick kids

and the sick kids are told they are trains pulling into mother and it is dark there, dammit, this is dark as Oedipus is and there is no desire in us worth mentioning, no temporary sort of heaven empty, no nowhere to be.

traditionally priests have lied to children like mothers and teachers do, they have lied almost as well as doctors and psychologists and the other women and men who make all sort of fleshy coffins for kids to live in with all their vaunted innocence that tastes like disingenuous and oblivion, the junkie touch of nothingness like a deviant corpse creeping from his heaven again to do things dazzlingly inappropriate, the moribund hopeless. this is the survival kit, the god box, the zombie carnivorous abstinence, the ascetic demons are eating memory or sleeping, there is light time here and the sleep of reasons. the children have appointments with death and convivial demons.

More about David McLean can be found here: 

 http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com/

nobody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.

laughing at funerals

A Review of 'SHE' by Christine Murray

A review of She by Christine Murray

She

Christine Murray

forthcoming from Oneiros Books

82 pp

review by David McLean

This book is splendid in its conception and execution. Purporting to be a poetic narrative of the process of madness that led to the catatonia of a lady called Constance, a person who has encountered a being called She in her dreams and become imbricated in a pattern of psychic events involving She. She would seem to be an archetype. She is the force of death in life, life in death, the essentially female and thus, one might speculate, then (1858) to be regarded as fundamentally evil. The character Constance notes in her introductory letter that the dreamworld is equally real to her.

I do not expect anyone will believe me, but I know 

that my dreaming-life is as real as my waking life. 

Indeed, I have learnt not to call these sleeping 

narratives anything other than a different part of my 

reality.

We can go further, there is no “different part” - she means “another part” - and this because dreamwork is fundamentally productive and creates reality, as real as the real external world is, for there is no real world characterized by the production of real values set against the fantasy world of desiring-production, as Deleuze and Guattari note. The “madness” os Constance is but creation of a world where she/She may live for the socius has given her a world that stinks.

The poems in the book are situated among stones and wood, in a petrified forest of sorts. They are set also in an Irish fogginess, gray Celtic and dour is the world and without the fatuity of small joy. The lady Constance accompanies She in her observations of the environment

The second half of the book concerns dreams set on a small island. Not the mainstream mainland that belongs to patriarchy and the males.

This is a switch to “another terrain” - it is another world but on an island that is also part of the normal dreamworld where the alleged “laws” of nature do not apply. She is the “embodiment of your unexpressed deeds” and thus in some ways maybe like a fury. She is real here for the first time, it is her element and an internal truer world than the false world wherein we live

Just as the pots in which I have cooked

have caught blood in steel, just as

Those very things used again and again

In places where there is no memory -

The tremor in my hand is not of fear at her unmasking

it is of age /ages and that recognition

I wondered at the time if my hand

My eye could tell /

Would live to describe

This thing

This memory

Of our meetings

Her cloths

(from “She is here now in her reality”)

It is an enlarged reality where the quotidian, even the 

 meaning that we create for it, is without much meaning. She seems to be a creature reclaiming debts. Even words and what words signify are revealed as devoid of value: even if they continue to signify, what they signify is shown to be less than nothing by the revitalized sight Constance 

acquires by encountering She, and She herself does not use 

or need words

To look at each thing anew 

 

Those books on my shelf /

The empty vase that bookends them

They were there /

They still rest on my night-table

Talismans/

Each a signifier and each without

A value to it

Standing on this beach of skulls in gathering dawn

Is what I have always been doing /

Bit by bit the /

Treasures of my existence are losing mass

I look again at the shelf/

My hands cannot trace the

Names of the books /

The place where my letters were

Slotted-in /

As an archetype of female life - sex and bitter love, death and mourning, futile- nostalgia for the lost - that She is, that maybe Constance becomes, she is standing on skulls, a beach of skulls, defiant relics of death. She is words and words celebrate nothing and the emptiness. Maybe She is fundamental truth and maybe Constance could not handle this, perhaps her 25 years in a coma were a sign of her failure, maybe they were a reward, a 25 years spent in an internal heaven.

Buy this book, Chris Murray is one of the best currently active poets. Here is a link to a preview.  
  
http://poethead.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/a-preview-of-my-new-book-she/

Thing the Dead Say-David McLean

David McLean's new poetry collection from Oneiros Books, available here

From 'In Damage Seasons'-Michael Mc Aloran

  'In Damage Seasons' (Oneiros Books).

nothing’s bones- (from the final section)

#1-

through lock of detritus acclimatised to the fallen lung’s parameters there’ll be to drive the coffin head with nails birthing the fallen attributes

scarred without longing there’ll be the stasis of it the hearse of the ever-laughter spun lest from out of darkened/ choke/ dead space and an empty pageant’s shadow

what forth birthed till struggle else in a pit of night cleft erased welts of teeth and the searing of the salient grin of the none exposed of

struck out from or where till wonder as if to be were to know of it sudden till excise the sharp stab of it the teeth kicked in blank spaces a vertigo of flesh of final fragments

fragments raining falling from the banquet flesh for as long as can be recalled or what words to drag from out of speechless sleepless a turning of black soil and therein of silver lights eclipsed

foraging the breath long-asking of the want in terms of sunlight spit them out your nubs your cancers dry-a-day-a-lock seethe in corners of dissolution’s breathing

all along as if to bite at the frozen cold lack of stone of the stone blood crack a bone the marrow emptied pissing freely

razor glint in dead light churning of where the silhouette falls to nothing’s bones exigent time or the lack of breathing of the wind the meat of it bound till axial exist yet not a trace non-death of a winter’s speech out of which stasis no nothing

forever what/ what bones of sky till breath reclaimed in the drag of here or there said or not till shattered blackened out a clasp of the deaf sun and all the lights there have never been or those that never were
 

#2

claimed yes forever claimed the eye still roving yes in the realms of the none or the breath not taken settling as ash or a casket's knowing

rat’s pulse tread step-non-step the laughter of children here then spoken of what once till on again the filtering through of the blood hence the cup lifted as if to spite where there is none

mockery of the artery’s abnegation a pulse of rotting silences even breath there’ll be sudden of in the bereft silences unclaimed

death yet always of the death yet as the spark’s breath subtle as the edge of a blade cuts the semblance away the death mask sun there or else ah kaleidoscope in a pit of slashed belonging

from out which the dead longing what waste the blackened veins the puerile none of it ever unto until erased what spun lie and the sudden of each the words no longer there or having fled unto nowhere else

tracing no no power in a white sheet stained with the blood's advance the meat hooks of all birthing and desire cracked stone a scattering of vapours vapours till din of nothing asked of

head what head long distance ahead gathering there’ll yet spoken of as if the meat knew better than the other which is the none perhaps knowing less or more no distance to trace ash in a cold palm strike a match a blessed bloom will follow after

it will say less the walls there as always birthing the breath of none stillness stillness of collapse catascope of bled shadow-knock a deft caress such was the memory there’ll yet be detritus of the vortices of eye breaking forth in semblance of the benign

wounds they say yet what wounds to breach when all is sudden tide a curved spine snap shadow play and the play of shadows mocking the erasing dawn with fingers to touch the dissipating vapours

outlived carried forth by what one asks as if to claim claim what winds to claim what blood to claim what breath to claim spun alack in the none that is in subtlety of 

 

#3-


static between the being and the breaking echoing bones a surge of foreign embers memories shit-stained walls existence bleeding itself dry no marrow the taste for it eradicated all asked of yet said without not a trace by design

there’ll be now circus attributes broken valves of teeth the flesh cast away into some banquet of desire scattering forth

till claimed a headless barrage what head there was never the stitches bind the light together the stitches birth the pale light of no consequence in a suicide of nothing sudden in outcry muted birthed all stepped alone

eye what eye of shut till the last benign furtive as breath-stun harrow a sudden asking of the build of it there or else stench reek of nothing of in the clear light of the nonetheless

non-day or night basking of the following till clearness of speech there was never any of the build to chase the fragrance away hollowed spat out collectively/ no/ that was of another time

yet surging into nothing till ragged bone claimed the eye what eye still roving in the nothing of it  here or there but for an instant into what birthing clogged the breath alone

such is the hearth of silence dragging its cold chamber into the death of all the death of nothing else cold chill breath aside the breath aside the laughter of the still-born ache

governed speech without name till obsolete till obsolete turning turning in the soil of the unforgiving memory till dread or the spasm of the frozen light

shafts of breath reaching beyond the abattoir’s asking telling as if to drift were to be but one in the vacancy of still-dread till shadow forth till shadowless all spun in the absence of the word to grace the emptily of the meat’s futility

here now the room of that which closes its fist around the throat of breath becoming ask of what winds to follow on from when the snare divides the breathing into nothing claimed ghosting the impress of silent hands sands eroded time what time is there ever
 

#4-

flayed or not a dead end sings sun the purpose of nothing teeth in a blaze twisted the nerve’s steel claimed in vortices of the ever-redundant

lack barbed it says the skull says the head what difference till breathen begotten laughs the foreign leg from out from under asking of the bleak till worship of

shadow cast a-dream they say sleep more or less to awaken in a majesty of shit tear the life from the closure of the build etch the skin with gift of absolute mutilation a broken tear flowing ever flowing

what word there was it is said in the beginning there was nothing lying through the teeth yes the teeth once again

approximately flesh depth till din of the non-received in the pissoir tide asking of the non-beginning the non-ending there’ll yet be the laughter of the silent casket a closed door surrogate of no purpose

yet still the sway of chains and the meat hook stylus idiot laughter and the freeze the incision bite what words to define the fucking meat of it the syllabus from aside the darkness grazes till bleed along some silence in-between the none of being

bite down hard upon the vacancy gathering the lightless pageantry to the breast so they say eye alone dreaming of the din eye alone in laughter stone upon stone till nothing having gathered

deafened yes by uproar and the silent word that places itself beneath the tongue of nothing herein the laughter of the claimed adrift what eye the eye of none vascular deaf mute scattered to the winds

ill seen what sung the gift of blind lesser than kicks to the fissure a cold gathering of futureless in the space of a/ the deft hand clipped settling to fall aside there’ll yet what distance breathing alone

blood yes asking of silent though in the breathing of some dreamscape ever-forgotten the lie of the flesh the headless wandering catacomb of breath and the eye unfolding as if it never was

 

#5-


laughter still to knock upon half-worn the fingernails extracted a slap to the face drag drag drag time and all of its light still crawling from the laughter of the depths in a non-space of lightless beauty

unfolding yes flowering unto graven flowers the stench of all none in the streets of the unclaimed blessed to fall what sung

these are the dead lands these are the unseen hands there or else the sun it mocks yet unknowing sing along till breath recedes till the pulse absolves the self of none

here a light there a light the barbed rhythm of night endless dregs dregs and the none till else along the way never motion and the grafted speech

close the door the rest will follow it is said such words resting never of the blossoming death till claimed nothing less than was before till remembered no nothing ever

locked to the sky the sky dead space all around in the bask of the rhetoric of silences enough to remove from glimmer of this or that in traceless broken upon the rocks of abattoir’s removal

yet feeding  feeding frenzy of barricaded teeth the split in the eye birthing the emasculate what tears till final stretch nothing of the alack the meld of skyless pissed upon once more till dearth of silent of

what spun long stretch of the obscene laughter till sky a-alock the din the retch of tears till bled scattered the non sense a bleeding wind

ice of the true shadow till lacking dream till spun of the spent corridor non else in the spurious of flesh burning to the hilt of it the death of galvanised

hence laughter longing and the breath of it till flesh eradicated till skyline of apocalyptic colourings held to the throat what dense silver unto shadowing

till pierce of none of the sunlight emptily absolved here now the traces the vapours cleft smoke drifting from out of lung till resend until erased lung less foreign yes 

IN DAMAGE SEASONS can be purchased here

'Of Dead Silences' reviewed by David McLean

  A review of Michael Mc Aloran's 

"Of Dead Silences"

Michael Mc Aloran
Of dead silences
Lapwing Publications
64 pp

This is a new book from Michael Mc Aloran and it is an investigation of the points in our progression through apparently evident memories that strive to ignore those very points, the points where the flies gather and there are rats in all the sewers, the same sewers we never noticed we lived in, the same rats we never noticed that we are.

 Annulled memory you are the thunder
Of the endless origin
Dragging light from out of the skeleton
Of a corpse’s nothing

The light is lies and gibberish, maybe, or maybe it is the simple self-evident truth that whatever Mc Aloran writes that sounds nasty is, as a matter of fact, pretty much hitting the nail right on its arrogant head.

Ruins of the foreign sky
From which point all are dead
Smears of dying animals upon clear glass
The flies will gather, nothing more

The  glass is still clear, you can see though it. The light earlier is still a light you can see with, even if it the foul light that originates from corpses. An insight is still an insight unless it does not say of what is that it is, or of that which is not that it is not. And that's pretty impressive. It is arguable that the origins of poetry were religious, the use of the intoxicating effect of repetition and melody to create a more powerful transfer of feeling through linguistic meanings.

Much modern poetry still staggers under the weight of this taint, it is the ramblings of drooling psychopaths who want their grannies not to be what these poems say they are, the rotten decayed relics of nothingness. The old dears, as Mick or I might say, are absent and missing forever; they might as well never have existed, so to hell with them. And there isn't even a hell, except the one we are living through as you, gentle reader, read this. Much poetry, for some reason, wants these grannies not to be dead and gone forever.

Here, in this chapbook, is the place poetry comes to when we are obliged to stop pretending to be climbing. Where our efforts take us is not the stars and heaven, it is more of the absurd and a more or less protracted ending. The ending is absolute and after us an unending nothing, the inexpressible that is not being. Words threaten understanding since they cling stubbornly to their origins as an index of what is, the via negativa does not work as a lonesome road for most “thinking”, unless poetry exists for no other reason than making me personally profoundly irritated. Mick's poetry stays in the safe place which most people might find unsafe and danger and madness, the acceptance of the absolute weight of lack, the loss, and absence.

Even believers grieve. This, as Hopkins points out, is really stupid (or words to that effect). A believer should not grieve the death of a loved one, if they really love them. So I am prepared to accept that people grieve, I am not prepared to accept that they really, in the strong sense, “believe”.

As I always like to say, citing Homer, “People do things because they are stupid and die because they deserve to.” The dead, and the living dead are legion, lack “the light by which the night ignites the living”, as Mc Aloran states here in one of his aphorisms. (To cravenly return to that of which we were actually speaking, the review of the particular poems.)

Living, basically, is wallowing in shit and it is best to stand before the emptiness and the senseless with the brave resolution of the ancient (and modern) Celts who live in dour lands inflicted with history and a climate that doesn't very much like them or anything else that wants anything in particular. As I'm sure the Celts really said to Caesar, “we are only afraid of one thing, and that's that alcohol might suddenly stop working so our race would basically have to disband.”

Brute flesh shocks the nothing back
Into resolve

And is then pissed upon

The bones that “scurry for the shadows” are just the truth, hiding from the “cracked sun” of belief, or even from the deficient light of conventional wisdom. These are the poems that tell us that everything isn't OK in the usual sense of the words. But that's OK, we always have

One final breath to champion the infinite

It might be a silence spitting but what it is spitting is still laughter, even if the laughing is spiteful. This is the first section of the book, the silhouettes.

Then we have the section of dead silences themselves.

The silence is always the observation of the deathscape that is what is and then the gap between memory and expectation and the need for contact that is buried forever in the skull that is assuming the cerements of the tomb already. And nothing coming, nothing cumming as we wait for it; silence the wait weighting the shoulders of skeletons clothed in slightly fresh flesh.

Reek unto assuaged….
Skinned breath sharp as shock/absent

Reek of dead silences/earthen splendour

Back again till naught and the obscene scatter of…
Dead again…a burning forest of silences

This book is heartily recommended by me; you should purchase it here

'Do Not Censor', by Craig Podmore--A Review by Christine Murray

Do Not Censor

by Craig Podmore Published Oneiros Books 2013

---

Jonestown

In the name of television, The crucifix And the glossy magazines
(The deflowered dead that we are.)

A-fucking-men. .  

  Jonestown, by Craig Podmore

Do Not Censor is divided into two sections, Fiction and Reality. Craig Podmore exposes the blurred line between the two in a manner that reflects how reality in a post-millenarist  culture of movie snuff and sex consumption that shows its hard edges much in the way drunken starlets upload their sex tapes to feed a  cannibalising machine that will have their blood..

The Ghosts in the Machine of Fiction parade their post-mortem selves as desired objects that  have burnt their image into our irises.  Distracting icons who hid a multitude whilst revealing generous  acres of flesh. They are the  abbatoir-hung victims of a real masochistic need for adulation and they are in the hands of the sadist.

from, The Polemic

‘The Crenshawgrave Where Beth Short lay Cut like a perfect film clip- Her body edited and framed. The raven dreamer Took the murder scene stage; The world shocked, bereaved- Death performance, a media sensation.’

Marilyn, Elizabeth Short , Betty Page,  icons of the industrial non-culture of post-WWII and Hiroshima, projected fellatrices and suicides, whose addictions fed (and feeds) psychotic addiction to non-reality. The very real reality of the undead. Here is the underbelly of vocalisation that Tom Waits sang in Sweet Little Bullet From The Barrel Of A Pretty Blue Gun. Save now the underbelly is writ large across an abattoir of ghastly smiles in every newsagent across western civilisation. A trickle down of Hollywood snuff culture into every home that bothers to buy it. Turn away from it :

 
Hollywood Is A Correctional Facility

‘The teenage girl Etching ‘Destroy’ onto her Book of Revelations. Shoplifting make-up That Greta Garbo wears’.

from Fiction.

The Reality section of Do Not Censor  is not problematic, it is emblematic. Here celluloid snuff is played out on shopping streets and in motel rooms. Here the sociopath/psychopath whose head is filled with Hollywood BDSM victimization gets their kicks in a two dimensional world, the type of psychopathy that leads to massacres at premieres, or robot warfare in suburban neighbourhoods.

 
Gunmen On The High Street
  ‘Morality is absent in consumerism As the gunmen shoot the shoppers down But the shoppers are numb to the bullets As they arise and continue to shop.’

from Reality

The reader needn’t assume the role of judge given the toxicity of post-milleniarism. The screen plays out Hollywood-snuff in the blurred lines between how a reality is perceived, and how it is writ large onto that tarnished screen where audiences are umbilically fed a diet of 50 ft buttocks and botoxed faces.

 
Daily Masturbation and Internal bleeding

‘Porn star dialogue For the menial tasks Of pro-creation

And biblical passages For the erotically charged

from Reality.

Again the undead have burned their irrationality into mass consumption, with reality a fine thread plucked and fucked by the advertisers who have people caring about stars weight increase, who is fucking who and why starlets do radical things to their bodies- whether implant or  removal of skin to the point of nauseating microscopy.

This is the culture of nadir – a nadir of cultural expression where flesh is the oldest currency. Its underbelly brought to the level of entertainment where entertainment aspires to culture.

Purchase Link for Do Not Censor

In Damage Seasons-Michael Mc Aloran

 

Prose poetry more anti-matter than literature, shards of glacial beauty, words bleached of context and affect decaying in space. 

"A slyer, hipper Beckett for the post-crack generation. Michael McAloran is one to watch out for." Sandy Hook (Black Wurm Gism magazine)

IN DAMAGE SEASONS is available from Oneiros Books, here